Cisco Picks Up Mark "Antennagate" Papermaster - PC Magazine

Cisco has hired the man responsible for Apple's famed "Antennagate" issues—Mark Papermaster, 49, has joined the company as vice president of Cisco's Silicon Switching Technology Group, which oversees the various chips that the company develops for its hardware switches. It's a profitable business for Cisco, as switches make up a significant portion of the company's overall revenue stream.

That said, Papermaster is likely looking to keep his name out of the press for any hardware upsets this time around. The former senior vice president of devices hardware engineering for Apple left the company in August of this year, a year and change after his arrival at Apple in April of 2009 (following a protracted legal battle with former employer IBM.)

It's unclear whether Papermaster's departure was the result of a cultural incompatibility within Apple or due to the simple fact that the iPhone 4 suffered a gentle reaming in the public eye from the alleged antenna issues users reported when trying to hold the device and make calls. So much so, that Apple itself decided to offer all purchasers of the iPhone 4 a free wraparound bumper shortly after the device's release in an effort to staunch users' signal loss issues.

Papermaster himself reportedly lost the confidence of Steve Jobs after the Apple CEO returned to the company following his recovery from a liver transplant in early 2009. Part of that has been attributed to Apple's corporate culture, according to undisclosed sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal.

At Apple, senior executives don't have as much room for delegation as other companies, for it's expected that those on the top will process even the tiniest details within their realms of control. The same sources indicated that perhaps this wasn't Papermaster's strong suit—as well, they claim he lacked the kind of creative thinking Apple propagates.

Regardless, Cisco needs its best captains to face the stormy sea of sales challenges that lie before it. The company recently took a huge hit to its stock price as a result of its most recent earnings announcement. Although Cisco announced greater earnings as compared to the previous quarter, investors punished Cisco for a 48 percent drop in its state government contracts quarter-to-quarter and a 35 percent drop in orders from cable operators, to name a few of Cisco's admitted challenges. The company's expected second-quarter revenue was approximately $1 billion under Wall Street projections.

As a result, investors sent the stock plummeting 16 percent –the biggest loss the company's seen since July of 1994. That's not the best financial omen for a company that's widely touted as a bellwether stock of the technology industry.

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San Francisco Bay Bridge closed in police standoff - Reuters

The Bay Bridge, linking Oakland to the east with San Francisco, is shown in San Francisco, California August 18, 2008.

Credit: Reuters/Robert Galbraith

SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Nov 11, 2010 1:50pm EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The San Francisco Bay Bridge was shut down for over an hour on Thursday after an apparently suicidal man claiming to have a gun and explosives stopped his car and threatened to blow it up, authorities said.

Traffic was halted on the bridge, a major commuter route into the city, when the man called in his threat at 6:58 a.m. It resumed flowing just over an hour later, after he was taken into custody.

Authorities said the unidentified man had his 16-year-old daughter in the car with him and may have been upset over marital issues.

The man threatened to blow up the Bay Bridge, but upon initial approach police determined he "wasn't much of a credible threat from an explosives standpoint," Highway Patrol spokesman Trent Cross said.

No explosives were recovered from the car and the man's daughter was being interviewed by authorities.

CHP Officer Shawn Chase said police on the scene witnessed the man, a resident of nearby Antioch, California, throw something into the bay.

"He said he had a fake gun, a toy gun that he threw over the rail," Chase said.

Shortly after the call, authorities stopped traffic to the bridge, designated as part of Interstate 80, at the westbound toll plaza, and asked westbound drivers already on the span to turn around and drive east.

Traffic on the bridge was lighter than normal because of the Veterans Day holiday in the U.S., Cross said.

The 8.4 mile Bay Bridge connects San Francisco to Oakland. Over 40 million vehicles crossed the span in the 2008-09 fiscal year, bringing in over $43 million in base tolls, according to the Bay Area Toll Authority.

(Reporting by Jonathan Oatis and Dan Levine; Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Jerry Norton)

Really ruined the commute this morning – I’m back at home trying to rescue some of the day by working from here. I hope the police ‘help’ him to let us know why he did this, perhaps he needs a little trip to Guantanamo… Just the amount of fuel wasted as hundreds of thousands of people sat there with their engines running was enough of a disaster to warrant a good investigation. The East Bay was a parking lot.

fiendish Report As Abusive

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This week in crazy: Glenn Beck - Salon

It is one of the oldest pieces of wisdom in conflict. Every successful military leader, every good chess- or poker player, every successful electoral politician, everyone ever in a conflict situation (as we are all sometimes) should have that maxim "pasted on the inside of his hat". So it is not surprising that Soros, being a very smart fellow, looked closely at Hitler, presumably the better to resist similar characters (there will always be such, alas) in his future. Indeed, anyone who is concerned with Nazism (and it's possible re-occurrence, which is not an inconceivable event as the world spirals into economic chaos and the inevitable enormous social dislocations coming) has to read "Mein Kampf". In it Hitler clearly laid out what he meant to do, and how he meant to do it. And he came awfully close to succeeding; but for his own fatal lack of judgment he could have won all his wars. The main military mistakes being: misjudging the strength of the USSR, failing to support Rommel's drive to the Suez Canal and beyond, not being prepared to follow up the quick defeat of France with an invasion of nearly defenceless Britain, and above all, unnecessarily declaring war on the US after pearl Harbor, which his treaty with Japan did not require him to do. It's possible that his monomaniacal drive to destroy the Jews also led him to mis-allocate resources to that end rather than in more strategically useful directions, not to mention depriving his economy and research of the talents of many Jewish experts: many of the men who developed the A-Bomb for us were refugee Jews from Hitler's Europe.

Much of his book is the tedious ranting of an auto-didactic, power-mad sociopath who found what he was pre-disposed to believe in various writers...but the pages on propaganda and the use of deception and outright lying (e. g. The Protocols of Zion, a well-exposed forgery) and PR is crystal clear, as he openly acknowledges his debt to American advertising for many techniques. Had he had to hand the power of television, who knows what he might have accomplished (among other things, putting me in a gas chamber)?

The raw materials for an American fascism are lying around us everywhere, not least in the frothings of Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin. Neither of them has the craftiness to be the leader of such a development, but rest assured that there are some out there who just might. If the economy really collapses (as it could if, say, the Mad Hatters of the Tea Party succeed in blocking the raise of the debt limit and so throwing the US into default and destroying the world's credit system) that possibility becomes ever more plausible. And Mr. Soros is a ready-made hate figure around which such a movement would happily coalesce.

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